3. Sacrifice.

But in thus achieving his individuality over against both his nation and his God, Jeremiah accomplished only half of the work he did for Israel and mankind. It is proof of how great a prophet we have in him that he who was the first in Israel to realise the independence of the single self in religion should also become the supreme example under the Old Covenant of the sacrifice of that self for others, that he should break from one type of religious solidarity only to illustrate another and a nobler, that the prophet of individuality should be also the symbol if not the conscious preacher of vicariousness. This further stage in Jeremiah's experience is of equally dramatic interest, though we cannot always trace the order of his utterances which bear witness to it.

There must often have come to him the temptation to break loose from a people who deserved nothing of him, but cruelly entreated him, and who themselves were so manifestly doomed. Once at least he confesses this.

O that I had in the wilderness  IX. 2 A wayfarers' lodge! Then would I leave my people, And get away from them; For adulterers all of them be, A bundle of traitors. 342 They stretch their tongues  3 Like a falsing bow, And never for truth Use their power in the land. But from evil to evil go forth And Me they know not!739739See above, p. 202.

Well might the Prophet wish to escape from such a people—worn out with their falsehood, their impurity, and their senseless optimism. Yet it is not solitude for which he prays but some inn or caravanserai where he would have been less lonely than in his unshared house in Jerusalem, sitting alone because of the wrath of the Lord. His desire is to be set where a man may see all the interest of passing life without any responsibility for it, where men are wayfarers only and come and go like a river on whose bank you lie, and help you to muse and perhaps to sing but never touch the heart or the conscience of you. It is the prayer of a poet sick of being a prophet and a tester. Jeremiah was weary of having to look below the surface of life, to know people long enough to judge them with a keener conscience than their own and to love them with a hopeless and breaking heart that never got an answer to its love or to its calls for repentance—wearied with watching habit slowly grow from ill to ill, old truths become lies or at the best mere formalities, 343 prophets who only flattered, priests to bless them, and the people loving to have it so.⁷⁴⁰⁷⁴⁰v. 31; p. 125. O to have no other task in life than to watch the street from the balcony!

But our prayers often outrun themselves in the utterance and Jeremiah's too carried with it its denial. My people—that I might leave my people—this, it is clear from all that we have heard from him, his heart would never suffer him to do. And so gradually we find him turning with deeper devotion to the forlorn hope of his ministry, his fate to feel his judgment of his people grow ever more despairing, but his love for them deeper and more yearning.

From the year of Carchemish onward he appears not again to have tried or prayed to escape. Through the rest of the reign of Jehoiakim they persecuted him to the edge of death. Prophets and priests called for his execution. He was stoned, beaten and thrust into the stocks. The king scornfully cut up the roll of his prophecies; and the people following their formalist leaders rejected his word. With the first captivity under Jehoiakim all the better classes left Jerusalem, but he elected to remain with the refuse. When in the reign of Ṣedekiah the Chaldeans came down on the city and Jeremiah counselled its surrender he was again beaten and was flung into a pit to starve to death. When he was freed and the 344 besiegers gave him the opportunity, he would not go over to them. Even when the city had fallen and her captors hearing of his counsel offered him security and a position in Babylonia, he chose instead to share the fortunes of the little remnant left in their ruined land. When they broke up it was the worst of them who took possession of his person and disregarding his appeals hurried him down to Egypt. There, on alien soil and among countrymen who had given themselves to an alien religion, the one great personality of his time, who had served the highest interests of his nation for forty years, reluctant but unfaltering, and whose scorned words, every one, had been vindicated by events, is with the dregs of his people swept from our sight. He had given his back to the smiters and his cheeks to them who plucked out the hair; he had not hidden his face from the shame and the spitting. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. He was taken from prison and from judgment and cut off from the land of the living; and they made his grave with the wicked, though he had done no violence neither was deceit in his mouth. It is the second greatest sacrifice that Israel has offered for mankind.

If Jeremiah thus of his own will suffered with his people, and to the bitter end with the worst of them, was he also conscious of suffering for them? After his death, when the full tragedy of his life came home to his people's heart, the sense of the few suffering for the many, the righteous for the 345 sinners, began to be articulate in Israel—remarkably enough, let us remember, in the very period when owing to the break-up of the nation the single soul came to its own and belief in the responsibility of every man for his own sins also emerged and prevailed. Of the influence of the example of Jeremiah's spiritual loneliness, combined with his devotion to his sinful people, in developing these doctrines of individualism and self-sacrifice for others there can be no doubt. The stamp of his sufferings is on every passage in that exilic work Isaiah XL-LXVI, which presents the Suffering Servant of the Lord and declares the atoning virtues of His Agonies and Death.

But it is not clear that Jeremiah ever felt anything of this about himself; if he did so he has refrained from uttering it. Yet he must have been very near so high a consciousness. His love and his pity for his sinful people were full. He can hardly have failed to descry that his own spiritual agonies which brought him into so close a personal communion with God would show to every other man the way for his approach also to the Most High and Holy and his reconciliation with his God. Again he was weighed down with his people's sins; he bore on his heart the full burden of them. He confessed them. The shame which the people did not feel for them, he felt; and he painted the curse upon them in words 346 which prove how deeply the iron had entered his own soul. He had a profound sense of the engrained quality of evil,⁷⁴¹⁷⁴¹ii. 22 f.; xiii. 23; xvi. 12; xvii. 1; etc. the deep saturation of sin, the enormity of the guilt of those who sinned against the light and love of God.⁷⁴²⁷⁴²ii. 11-13, 22, 25, 31 f. A fallacy of his day was that God could easily and would readily forgive sin, that the standard ritual might at once atone for it and comfortable preaching bring the assurance of its removal. He denied this, and affirmed that such things do not change character; that no wash of words can cleanse from sin, no sacraments, however ancient, can absolve from guilt.⁷⁴³⁷⁴³ii. 35; v. 31; vii. 4-11, 21 ff.; xi. 15; xiv. 12. That way only strict and painful repentance can work; repentance following the deep searching of the heart by the Word and the Judgments of God and the agony of learning and doing His Will.⁷⁴⁴⁷⁴⁴iv. 3, 4; vii. 3 ff. etc. To its last dregs he drank the cup of the Lord's wrath upon His false and wilful nation; he suffered with them every pang of the slow death their sins had brought upon them. And yet he was most conscious of his own innocence when most certain of his fate. The more he loyally gave himself to his mission the more he suffered and the nearer was he brought to death. The tragedy perplexed him,

Why is my pain perpetual, My wound past healing?745745xv. 18.

The only reply he heard from heaven was the order to stand fast, for God was with him to deliver—but that more troubles awaited him. And beyond this what is there to answer the staggering Prophet save that if a man have the Divine gifts of a keener conscience and a more loving heart than his fellows, there inevitably comes with such gifts the obligation of suffering for them. Every degree in which love stands above her brethren means pain and shame to love though as yet she bear no thorn or nail in her flesh. This spiritual distress Jeremiah felt for the people long before he shared with them the physical penalties of their sins. Just there—in his keener conscience, in his hot shame for sins not his as if they were his, in his agony for his people's estrangement from God and in his own constantly wounded love—lay his real substitution, his vicarious offering for his people.

Did Jeremiah ever conceive the far-off fulness of the travail thus laid upon his soul, the truth that this vicarious agony of a righteous man for the sins of others is borne by God Himself? To that question we have only fragments of an answer. In his discourses, both earlier and later, when he talks directly in the Name of the Deity—when 348 the Deity speaks in the first person—the words breathe as much effort and passion as when Jeremiah speaks in his own person. The Prophet is very sure that his God is Love, and he hears that love utter itself in tones of yearning for the love of men, and even of agony for their sin and misery. There is, too, a singular prayer of his which is tense with the instinct, that God would surely be to Israel what Jeremiah had resolved and striven to be—not a far-off God who occasionally visited or passed through His people, but One in their midst sharing their pain; not indifferent, as he fears in another place,⁷⁴⁶⁷⁴⁶Debase not the throne of Thy Glory, xiv. 21. to the shame that is upon them, but bearing even this. The prayer which I mean is the one in XIV. 8, 9, which recalls not only the terms but the essence of Jeremiah's longing to escape from his people, and lodge afar with wayfaring men, aloof and irresponsible.

O Hope of Israel, His Saviour In time of trouble. Why be like a passenger through the land, Or the wayfaring guest of a night? Yet Lord Thou art in our midst, Do not forsake us.747747xiv. 8, 9; see p. 57.

I may be going too far in interpreting the longing and faith that lie behind these words. 349 But they come out very fully in later prophets who explicitly assert that the Divine Nature does dwell with men, shares their ethical warfare and bears the shame of their sins. And the truth of it all was manifested past doubt in the Incarnation, the Passion and the Cross of the Son of God.

But whether Jeremiah had instinct of it, as I have ventured to think from his prayer, or had not, he foreshadowed, as far as mere man can, the sufferings of Jesus Christ for men—and this is his greatest glory as a prophet.